North Korea “makes” its first Android “hand phone…convenient for its users”

Kim Jong-un tours a factory that is said to be making the "Arirang" smartphone.

Every once in a while the weirdness of North Korea crosses our radar. The world’s pariah loves to engage in some good old-fashioned cyberattacks, steal footage from Call of Duty, or engage in GPS jamming. But this weekend, Kim Jong-un—or if you prefer, the Great Successor—apparently visited the “May 11 Factory” in Pyongyang to witness the production and manufacturing of North Korea’s first mobile phone.

The phone, named “Arirang” after a popular folk song, appears to be an Android phone of some kind. No word is yet available on what its precise specifications are.

“I’m sure it’s a real phone,” Martyn Williams, a tech journalist for IDG News Service, told Ars. Williams also runs North Korea Tech, one of the first websites to report the story. “It's almost certainly on sale through Koryolink, but I doubt it's made in the DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea, aka North Korea).”

Koryolink is the joint venture between North Korea’s Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications and Orascom, an Egyptian mobile firm. Recently, Koryolink hit two million subscribers.

“North Korea has made such claims before, and on several occasions, they've been proved to be wrong—see the most recent tablet that turns out to come from China,” Williams added. “The country has little expertise in hardware manufacturing—its expertise is in software. And when China does manufacturing so well and so cheaply, why bother fussing with that side of things, especially with export controls in place?”

He [Kim Jong-un] praised them for developing an application program in Korean style which provides the best convenience to the users while strictly guaranteeing security.

After learning about the performance of a touch hand phone, he said that a hand phone is convenient for its user when that part of the phone is sensitive.

He noted that these hand phones will be very convenient for their users as their camera function has high pixels.

Cyrus Farivar
Cyrus is the Senior Business Editor at Ars Technica, and is also a radio producer and author. His latest book, Habeas Data, about the legal cases over the last 50 years that have had an outsized impact on surveillance and privacy law in America, is due out in May 2018 from Melville House. Emailcyrus.farivar@arstechnica.com//Twitter@cfarivar